For Gainesville residents who are still only vaguely aware, our city’s heart is black and toxic. Since its creation way back in 1916 for use by a chemical treatment plant for wood products, esp. telephone poles and railroad ties, using creosote, and subsequently even more poisonous Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA), this site has been chemically abused. Now known as the Cabot-Koppers Superfund (= Hazardous!) site, it has reached a warning level where this travesty can now no longer be ignored, having become a serious threat to Gainesville as a once pleasant place in which to live and be educated. Astoundingly, to this day, Koppers Co. is being allowed to continue to pollute Gainesville, from its center outwards into all surrounding neighborhoods. Identical dire waring signals about Koppers related environmental and Public Health issues have steadily come to light over the last two decades in many other towns and cities in states throughout the nation. This is simultaneously of grave personal health concern and general environmental impact to all citizens of Gainesville. So please show that you care and JOIN US! in our rallies to cleanse our city of this well known polluter and its toxic, carcinogenic pollutants.

Long-time resident of the adjacent Stephen Foster Neighborhood, David Pais is just one of the many Gainesville citizens who fully comprehends the hazardous health danger that the federally listed Cabot-Koppers Superfund site poses to himself, his neighbors, and the city in general. As he too knows, the “fox is guarding the hen-house” because Beazer Corp. has been allowed to control and create much of the record of so-called “tests”, as well as a woefully inadequate “Feasibility Study” for the site’s eventual clean-up, which reads like an exercise in corporate spin-doctoring. Meanwhile, the EPA is asleep at the wheel, as usual, and the City, County, and State continue to allow the Koppers Co. industrial wood-treatment plant to freely pollute our creeks and aquifer system with their highly toxic chemical cocktails such as Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA); this especially during frequent periods of flood and storm-water run-off during the high rainfall summer months. Dioxin-laden dust clouds, then predominate during the much drier, windier, low-humidity winter period that runs for about 5 months (Nov. – Mar.) in north central Florida.

Gainesville’s Cabot-Koppers Superfund site is awash in Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA), especially during heavy storms when the Koppers Co. industrial wood-treatment plant freely allows quantities this highly toxic brew to pollute the city’s creeks and aquifer system. CCA is among a list of fully 32 dangerous toxins that have been officially recorded as pollutants on, and from, the site. Joe Prager and his wife learned the hard way about the risks of prenatal exposure to chemically (CCA) treated lumber. This motivated the establishment of their organization BAN CCA (www.bancca.org). They want to do everything possible to ensure that consumers know about the the dire risks to human health that exposure to CCA-treated wood can cause. The Pragers firmly believe that if they had been properly warned about the hazards of this product, then they would not have purchased, or handled, CCA lumber products, and that their daughter would not have been born with birth defects. Indeed, if the Consumer Awareness Programs had worked, they most likely would not have been exposed. Similarly, if most of the residents of the adjacent Stephen Foster Neighborhood had been informed about the dangers in general of Cabot-Koppers, they would never have purchased and/or moved to homes there!

Gainesville is the “poster-child” for an all-too-familiar national syndrome regarding “Superfund sites”; namely those areas throughout the US that have been so heavily polluted by corporate abuse, misuse, and mismanagement that they have been officially registered as serious hazards to human health by the Federal Government (EPA). Gainesville’s very own, dead-center (pun intended) Cabot-Koppers Superfund site was so designated in 1983. Since then, more than a quarter of a century has elapsed, plus an interminable sequence of studies, re-studies, and corrections to these studies and re-studies of the site, has been undertaken by various entities. Despite all of the play-down-the-problem EPA propaganda (especially EPA’s so-called “community involvement” documentation), which claims that the agency supposedly invites members of the public-at-large to join in the search for the truth about each specific site, and so involves us in finding solutions to the problems, there is now a huge and still mounting body of documentation that demonstrates that reality is quite the contrary; that EPAs “community involvement” is now a well and truly failed aspiration.

The Cabot-Koppers Superfund site, federally designated as an official hazard to human health in 1983, began polluting Gainesville nearly a century ago, way back in 1916! Incredibly, for almost 27 years, the Beazer Corp. owned site, operated by their Koppers Chemical Wood-treatment Co., has been allowed by city, county, state, and federal governments, to be actively used by this well-known polluter for its business, and so to keep toxifying Gainesville! Arsenic-tainted storm-water runs off the site into our creeks and creosote and related pollutants have almost reached Gainesville’s city aquifer, supplying water to its over 175,000 residents!

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